A Global Goring 

I don’t know how many people watched the program on PBS last night about an organization that puts homeless people in foreclosed homes. I did and I really believe that although the law is being broke that this is actually a humane and sensible response to homelessness and properties sitting empty and vulnerable to vandalism. So I found the organizations web site and from information on the site, it seemed to be an organization only focused on homeless black Americans rather than the whole of America. And while I think that’s great to focus on black issues, I wanted to know why the focus wasn’t more race inclusive. While my assumptions may have been incorrect, I also wanted to get more information so I could be more informed as to the why’s and how’s. So I sent an email which I have copied along with the shocking response I received. Please read and share your comments because I truely believe my question for this organization was legitimate and NOT based on WHITE FEAR as was stated in their response. Please also note the obvious capitalization of black and lower case spelling of white in their response…GODDAMN I”M PISSED!!!

My initial email:

Hi

I just saw a program on PBS about your efforts to put the homeless in foreclosed homes. I have always thought the same thing! Why let a perfectly good home sit empty and vulnerable to vandalism? People without homes who can pay the utilities SHOULD be allowed to live in these homes, it’s simply the humane thing to do. I applaud you for what you are doing, it is the right thing to do. I am glad you were profiled in a public forum.

I checked out your website and while I understand where you’re coming from where it concerns black Americans, i wonder why you don’t help ALL people in the same situation? I checked out your website to see how I could also get involved but I must be honest, while I do understand the discrimination black people have suffered and think it’s reprehensible, I just wanted to know why only ONE group and not all can receive your help?

I would like to help in my area like you have done, but I can’t see helping only one segment of society. I appreciate your time and response. Thank you Read more »

Penn and Teller - Bullshit! - Environmental Hysteria

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures - a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you’d be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they’d thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming “deniers” for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn’t such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital. Read more »

National debate sparked after Caucasian student seeking ‘race-based honor’ booted out of school

The Omaha suspension of a white high-school student originally from South Africa is sending shock waves across America as debate rages over who can claim rights to the term “African-American.”

The case centers on Trevor Richards, a junior at Westside High School, who moved from Johannesburg
to Nebraska six years ago.

Richards and his classmates, 16-year-old twins Paul and Scott Rambo, were booted from classes
last week after distributing posters touting Trevor as a candidate for Westside
High’s “Distinguished African-American Student” award on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“The posters were intended to be satire on the term African-American,” Scott Rambo told the Omaha World-Herald.

Principal John Crook says the posters were disruptive.

“It was offensive to the individual being honored, to people who work here and to some students,” Crook told the paper. “My role is to make sure we have a safe environment, physically and psychologically. We can’t allow that kind of thing to be hung up on our walls.” Read more »

The Obama administration says it is time to increase mileage requirements for cars and trucks. The auto industry is apparently on board:

In secret conversations, the Obama administration has lined up support from many state governments and a huge array of domestic and foreign automakers, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, BMW and many more.

Auto executives are flying into Washington from around the world for the White House announcement.

Now, it could be that the administration is overstating the degree to which industry leaders support this plan — it has done that before. But if this report is accurate, it represents a pretty dramatic reversal for the auto industry. In previous years, the domestic automakers have spent millions opposing higher fuel-economy standards on the grounds that compliance would be ruinously expensive:

All in all, domestic automakers figure that it will cost them $83 billion to meet the new regulations, which call for a hike in the corporate average fuel economy to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. That would be a lot of money for prosperous Google or Berkshire Hathaway, much less an industry that is already losing billions of dollars.

Of course, paying for the new standards is no longer Detroit’s problem. It’s our problem.

Barack Obama promised that he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. He neglected to mention that this tax exemption would go only to those who don’t use electricity, gasoline, heating oil or natural gas.

The truth of the matter is that Obama will raise taxes on practically all middle-class Americans. But that’s not all; in addition to new taxes on all those necessities (just think of all the appliances in your home that use electricity), he will drastically reduce our standard of living.

Obama warned during his campaign in Oregon that we can no longer keep our homes set at 72 degrees (warmed in the winter and cooled in the summer), eat whatever foods
we want (if meat and milk products come from cows that have to be fed) and drive SUVs (to accommodate our family and friends). He said we shouldn’t continue to consume 25 percent of the world’s resources when we have only 4 percent of the world’s population.

Why not? Americans have built a free enterprise, private-property, rule-of-law, respect-for-contracts, innovation-receptive society that has enabled us to enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. We designed it by adoption of our unique and long-lasting U.S. Constitution, we worked for it and we paid for it. So, why can’t we enjoy the fruits of our labor? Read more »

Rick Wagoner, outgoing CEO of General Motors, will be eligible to collect $20 million in retirement benefits from GM, the company that lost tens of billions of dollars under Wagoner’s leadership:

Upon his departure, Wagoner becomes eligible for both a “Salaried Retirement Plan” and an “Executive Retirement Plan” with General Motors. The combined value of the plans at the end of last year was $20.2 million, a GM spokesperson confirmed.

“Most of that will be paid out as an annuity over five years, the remainder is a small lifetime annuity,” said GM spokeswoman Julie M. Gibson.

However, the Washington Post reported this morning that Wagoner would not be leaving GM immediately, “because if he leaves the company he is entitled to a multimillion-dollar pension that the government does not want to pay.” Additionally, under the already-standing TARP agreement between GM and the Treasury Department, GM Is not allowed to pay severence fees to senior executives. “That ban does not appear to apply to retirement benefits, however.

The founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, wants to sue Al Gore for fraud, along with companies that sell carbon credits. Coleman, who feels the network he created in 1982 is now losing sight of its initial focus, has been a long-time skeptic about global warming.

Now, he’s hoping that a lawsuit — with its accompanying legal discovery and scientific testimony — will serve as a vehicle for a full-fledged fact-finding debate to learn whether there’s any truth to the whole “global warming” thing. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a scam:

    “As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years, there’s been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than that, and the last year has been so cold that that’s been erased,” he said.

    “I think if we continue the cooling trend a couple of more years, the general public will at last begin to realize that they’ve been scammed on this global-warming thing.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is ignoring news of the lawsuit, possibly because Al Gore is just so darn fashionable these days.

After all, doesn’t he hang out with Bono and parody himself on SNL? Isn’t he on the Hollywood A-list for party invites?

Frankly, Al Gore pretty much convinced me that he’s out of touch reality when, at the Nobel Prize Concert, he used the same tired speech he’d previously given to the U.N. (video). You know, the one where he hammers on how “we in our generation will find the moral authority and capacity for long-term vision”.

Oh, sure, it went over just fine when he was talking to a crowded gathering of other old farts, but seemed rather smarmy at the Nobel Prize Concert where he was old enough to have fathered (or grandfathered) half of audience.

Best way to reduce carbon emissions: tape Al Gore’s mouth shut for a while.

Washington Post article on the hedge fund holdouts who forced Chrysler into bankruptcy is headlined: “In Chrysler Saga, Hedge Funds Cast As Prime Villain: Firms Say They Were Right to Hold Out”.

I was interested to see what kind of argument the firms would be able to mount for the proposition that their actions were “right,” which I take to be a term connoting something like “ethical” or “morally justified.” It turns out, however, that they mean something rather different:

“Some of the characterizations that were used today to refer to us as speculators or to say we’re looking for a bailout is really unfair,” said one executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “What we’re looking for is a reasonable payout on the value of the debt . . . more in line with what unions and Fiat were getting.”

George Schultze, the managing member of the hedge fund Schultze Asset Management, a Chrysler bondholder, said, “We are simply seeking to enforce our bargained-for rights under well-settled law.”

They’re not actually saying that what they did was right. Rather, they’re saying that it was selfish but also legal. Which is fair enough. People aren’t allowed to just do any old selfish and greedy thing they like. You can’t break into my house and steal my TV. But the law does afford wide latitude for the impulses of selfishness and greed. So one is within one’s rights, under certain circumstances, to insist on one’s ability to inflict suffering on vast numbers of people in order to make more money for your rich self and your rich clients. But it seems very odd to characterize it as “unfair” to be subjected to moral criticism for one’s conduct.

This, however, is one of the signal properties of our age. It’s one thing to model human activity as driven solely by the relentless pursuit of money. Such models can enlighten various situations. But it’s another thing entirely to actually recommend such a lifestyle as optimal or moral, or to make the claim that any conduct that rationally serves the goal of increased personal wealth is therefore “right” or that to criticize self-interested and socially destructive behavior is “unfair.” I think Obama is to be congratulated for his handling of the situation. He didn’t have the FBI storm in, guns blazing, and take these people’s money. He respects the law. He respects property rights. He’s going to go through the bankruptcy process. But he also didn’t respect the ethic of greed that’s come to dominate American public life. He reserved the notion that some conduct is wrong and worthy of criticism and held out the ideal that selfish people might someday be motivated not only by acquisitiveness but by some kind of shame and a desire to behave—or, at a minimum, be seen as behaving—in a public spirited manner.

Reclaiming the idea that there are ethical issues in life that don’t relate to gay marriage or abortion will be an uphill struggle, but it’s an important one.

Earlier this month, while  in Houston, TX I almost spilled my latte in my lap when I read this on the front page of the Chronicle: ” Mayor Proposes Fines for Unsorted Trash.”

The story began: “Garbage collectors would inspect Houston, TX, residents’ trash to make sure pizza crusts aren’t mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by the Mayor.” Isn’t that what homeless people do — rooting around in other people’s garbage? If Houston Area residents are caught failing to separate the plastic bottles from the newspapers, according to the newspaper story, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

“We don’t want to fine people,” the mayor is quoted saying reassuringly. “We want to change behavior.” Translation: Do exactly as we say and no one gets hurt.

When I was a kid, the environmentalists promoted their clean skies and antilittering agenda mostly through moral suasion — with pictures of an Indian under a smoggy sky with a tear rolling down his cheek or the owl who chanted on TV: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.” Such messages made you feel guilty about callously throwing a candy bar wrapper on the ground or feeling indifferent toward car fumes.

But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. The most glaring example of course is the multitrillion-dollar cap-and-trade anti-global warming scheme that would mandate an entire restructuring of our industrial economy. This plan, endorsed by both presidential candidates, would empower climate-change cops to regulate the energy usage and carbon emissions of every industry in America. If we do this, the best estimates are that we could reduce global temperatures by 0.1 degrees by 2050 and save on average about one polar bear a year from early death. But no burden is too great when it comes to helping the planet — even if the progress to be made is infinitesimal. To weigh costs and benefits is regarded as sacrilege — the refuge of global warming “deniers.”

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